EXCLUSIVE: Yellowstone seemed a high bar to top for Taylor Sheridan when it became the top rated show on cable. It didn’t take long, A drama about a fixer in the volatile world of oil wildcatters, Landman immediately found an audience of 14.9 million global households its first four weeks, becoming the highest ever rated show on Paramount+, and surpassing the various iterations of the Dutton clan in popularity. Key to striking oil was convincing Billy Bob Thornton, after a memorable cameo in 1883, to play the oil field fixer Tommy Morrison, the catalyst for an exploration into a boom or bust world that had been relatively unexploited for its dramatic potential. It is inspired by the Texas Monthly podcast series Boomtown.
Thornton’s turn as Tommy Morrison has made him an Emmy frontrunner as a grizzled and beleaguered fixer of seemingly insurmountable problems ranging from oil rig explosions to violent cartel collisions, as he keeps the flow going for boss and lifelong best friend oil baron (Jon Hamm). Morrison lost his own family when his own oil business went bust, but his glamourous ex-wife, son and daughter return and fill out a spectacularly dysfunctional family dynamic. Thornton was key to a tapestry woven by Sherican that worked out beyond his wildest dreams.
“Well, he was from the world, right? Maybe not the oil world, but he is from, from rural America,” Sheridan told me. “His family’s from Texas. He feels true to this place. There’s a fierceness to him, a fearlessness as an actor that lends real way to his words. He feels like someone who just won’t back down. There’s a line that he says in Bad Santa that made an impression on me. I’m paraphrasing it, but he says something along the lines of, I’m really good in a fight because I’m not scared of getting hit. And so that’s a perfect embodiment of Tommy in Landman of that character, right? He’s a fighter, not because he’s necessarily a good fighter, but because he’s just so resilient and isn’t scared of getting hit.
Thornton first demonstrated that versatility as an actor with range in dramas like Monster’s Ball, Friday Night Lights and A Simple Plan, and comedies like Bad Santa and Love Actually. He carved a niche as a writer and director of independent films, like his Oscar-winning breakout Sling Blade, and All The Pretty Horses, a movie that left him never wanting to direct again, he felt so demoralized by then-Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein, whom Thornton feels hacked the film to bit and took out its heart.
More recently, when he wasn’t recording albums or touring with his band The Boxmasters, Thornton found an alternative outlet for his restless creative spirit. A deep dive into the streaming pool. Landman is the most successful in a string of limited series performances that included 1883, Fargo, and Goliath. This after he turned down numerous series that became hits, before he understood the creative satisfaction of longform storytelling without the shackles placed on network TV.
“Some of this was being from the old school where you didn’t do TV,” Thornton told me during a lunch at Manhattan’s Whitby Hotel, where he sipped some kale soup as a diversion from nursing a few glasses of Michelob Ultra. “TV to us was like a bad word, and so I just told Geyer [Kosinski] my manager, I just said, look, this is good, but I don’t want to do it.”
That would give way to a realization that streaming was a strong alternative to his indie film stomping grounds, where every picture is a death struggle. The money was good, and the lack of creative meddling and edginess was even better, as evidence by long story telling successes like True Detective, Sons of Anarchy, Ray Donovan and many others.
“I love movies, but the movies that are being made these days, for the most part, I just haven’t seen anything I wanted to do,” Thornton said. “Once I got into this, I realized the only reason we didn’t want to do TV before was because it was censored. You couldn’t have the violence or the language or the nudity or whatever’s required, on a network TV show. I suppose they were doing it on HBO to a degree, but other than that you really couldn’t.
“So I thought, well, this is really a 10 hour movie. All these things I’ve been doing, they’re 10 hour movies, each season. Who wouldn’t want 10 hours to develop a story and a character? I actually find it better. And what director have you ever heard say, I want my movie to be shorter? So for directors, they’ve got the opportunity, or creators like Taylor, he has the opportunity to develop this over a period of time. I came to realize it’s maybe the best format we have now, and I think more and more people have realized that. I’m not saying that there still can’t be great movies, I’ll do one after we tour the band because I love the script and director too much to turn it down.”
Thornton’s first series was a turn as a ball busting murderer in Fargo. His character announced the show’s tone by checking into a hotel where he witnessed a clerk berated by his boss. When she walked away, he convinced the clerk that if he had any pride, he would take a leak in the gas tank of her car as revenge. By the time he gets to his room, the killer calls down and and tells the boss someone curiously was urinating in the gas tank of her car. The rough playfulness by Noah Hawley mirrored the offbeat quirky humor Joel and Ethan Coen injected in their Fargo film, and Thornton was hooked.
“There’s a scene where the FBI guys are sitting out waiting for me,” Thornton said. “There’s this big building. I’ve got about five or six guns under a trench coat, and those agents — played by Key and Peele — were arguing over a submarine sandwich in the car. They didn’t even see me walk across the street. I go in the door and the camera never takes you inside the building. The camera on a crane just brooms up outside the building as you hear the gunfire. Then I come out on the roof and I thought that was a brilliant thing that Noah Hawley cooked up. We’ve seen the other way [to shoot that scene], and this was spookier, just hearing the gunfire on every floor, and then all of a sudden I appear, jump over to the next roof and I’m gone. I loved that. Fargo is the thing that made me want to start doing this. Really. Then I took Goliath, which was written originally for Kevin Costner but they couldn’t make a deal or something. These were awesome, and so when Taylor told me about this, and explained the world and the character, and that it would be written in my voice? I feel like those two characters, and then Tommy Morrison, there’s a little bit of Bogart.
“The guy who, you don’t always know what’s going on in his head, but he is just beaten up. But he also doesn’t put up with any shit from anybody. Yeah. I love the way the first season of Landman started with me under that pillowcase [where he negotiates a land lease with a cartel soldier]. That wasn’t originally the first scene but it was such an unusual and powerful starting point. You don’t really know what the hell’s going on. And then to end it that way too, in the finale? I mean, my goodness.”
Key in Sheridan’s mind was he needed an actor who could go through extremes, getting beaten to a pulp and then trying to deal with a needy wife whose ring tone on the car phone is reminiscent of Psycho and jolts the viewer every time. Sheridan saw it in 1883, when Marshall Jim Courtright turned from amiable lawman to stone killer in a barroom full of bad hombres.
“That fierceness and fearlessness as an actor translates to a character that also embodies those characteristics,” Sheridan said. “You’ll notice a common theme in my world now. There are actors I really admire, and I approach them and see if they want to dance for a day or two and see how we all get along. And if we do get along, which we typically seem to, then I say, okay, let’s get married. That worked really well. Let’s commit. That’s what we did.
“1883 really changed the way I do this, and you and I have gone over this,” Sheridan told me. “I found Isabel May when I read her for Mayor of Kingstown. Instantly, I knew there was my eyes into this harsh world. Paramount made a deal at my request with Isabel before a word had ever been written. For me as a writer, it is better to know exactly who I’m writing for, as opposed to writing a script and then going out and seeing who’s available and who sparks to it, which can completely alter the way in which it’s presented and completely change the voice and change what I’m trying to say. I reached out to Billy and said, I have a world I want to drag you through. I told him the world. He said, great. We made a deal and I wrote it for him. So there was no hoping he’s going to spark to it because he was already committed contractually, and I knew he would like it. I’d studied his work from the beginning of my career, and I felt very confident that it was exactly the way he would want to navigate this world.”
Much like Martin Scorsese and Nick Pileggi did by packing tons of practical information about wiseguy business Goodfellas, Landman tells the viewer everything they need to know about oil consumption and its future and the perils of trying to draw it from desolate ungodly places.
“I can’t speak for Taylor, but even though it might look like it on the surface, is it doesn’t really come from a point of view of someone’s agenda,” said Thornton, who liked looking at that business without cynical judgment. “A lot of people may have had the wrong idea in the beginning because it was like, oh, this is a pro oil show. It’s not. It’s just a show showing you, this is how shit works in the oil business. Like you said about Goodfellas, they weren’t saying, killers are awesome. It just says, here’s what they do. We’re not saying oil is awesome, that destroying the environment is awesome. We’re saying we don’t have anything else right now. There’s that scene where my character says to this lawyer who’s on her high horse, okay, I get it. But you know how that turbine got out here? It’s made out of oil? You know what your lipstick’s made out of? Oil. I actually say in there, if we find an alternative, that’s awesome because I guarantee you the oil guys who own these companies, if they found out that everything could run on water, they’d get in the water business. And that’s all it’s saying. These guys are about making money. The oil business is a gamble. You don’t always become a billionaire, and you can become a billionaire and lose it all. It’s just a look behind the curtain at how this works and how it affects the people around them, how it affects their family, what political shit it stirs up. It just shows you how it works.”
In person, Thornton seems as cool and composed as his unflappable Tommy Norris character. Truth is, he kind of falls apart if he isn’t tapping into an outlet for his creativity, all the time.
“Taylor sent me the first script, which I loved, and then a couple more episodes and I was like, Taylor, this thing’s a monster,” Thornton recalled. “And then the strike happened. So he couldn’t write anymore for a while. Once the strike got settled, he wrote all the rest of it. I think before the strike, he had five episodes done. So I’d read five. He did the other five as soon as the strike was over. The thing about Taylor, and I’m the same kind of writer, it’s kind of stream of consciousness. You’re not really sure where you’re going when you start, you know what I mean? It’s like you know what the setup is, who these people are, but he kind of lets the characters dictate where it goes. So as he’s writing, he’s, he may know what the end result is, or how they get there, he may not know. I’ve actually asked him that before. I’d say, so what’s, when we get to episode seven, what’s going on? He goes, I have no fucking idea, but he lets it where to go? Me? I wrote Sling Blade in nine days, over the period of a month. I remember it because I had my oldest son, Willie, a couple of years old, and I’m writing on paper with a pencil, because I don’t know how to type. I was raised with severe dyslexia, and I have OCD and anxiety disorder, all this stuff.
“I had this little kid on my knee writing, and when I started Sling Blade, the first thing I wrote was that opening monologue to the woman from the school who’s interviewing me. It’s like nine minutes long. That’s all I had. I didn’t know where that movie was going. I had no idea. I started writing and it literally told me what to do. Remember that Syd Field book on screenwriting that said, all main characters must be introduced within the first 10 pages? That was the first thing I ever read on screenwriting and I’m like, well, boy, I’m fucked here.”
Sheridan rises at the crack of dawn and does cowboy ranching stuff, and narrative problems work themselves out in his head. Thornton’s need to fill his day with creative tasks is extreme in a different way.
“I very rarely rewrite anything I never rewrote a word of Sling Blade,” said Thornton of the script which would win him an Oscar. “It was exactly what I wrote was in there. In editing, I cut two or three scenes, but not much. This was when I had final cut because the company that financed it out of New York, The Shooting Gallery, I already had a deal with these kids for the final cut and so Harvey Weinstein couldn’t do anything about it. Believe me, he tried. When people ask you about your process, I always tell ’em my process started when I was born. I just use life experience. As an actor and a writer, I am more influenced by novelists than I am screenwriters. I didn’t grow up on movies. I didn’t know anything about ’em. I was a musician and a baseball player. I always tell people that my success came from ignorance because I didn’t know how you’re supposed to do this stuff. So as a result, I always came out kind of natural because it was all I knew how to do.
“All I know is, if I stop creating, all of my afflictions come to the forefront,” he said. “It’s become a blessing and a motivator, but it was a hard road. I was a stutterer as a child. I mean, I was just thought of as stupid. My childhood informed everything that I am today. It was a dream. And my dreams were only in sports and entertainment. I worked a lot of shitty jobs doing physical labor. But the whole time I was doing it, I actually created everything I do now, while I was shoveling asphalt or working at the sawmill. I was a daydreamer, which is not always safe at a sawmill, by the way. I came out with all my fingers. Taylor, he never stops the bats. And I think probably Taylor has some demons. We haven’t talked about it, but there’s something about certain kinds of personalities that if you’re not creating. For him, the rodeo stuff is creating too. If you’re not doing that, if there’s silence…”
Thornton shudders imperceptibly.
“A vacation to me is a nightmare,” he said. “To sit on a beach someplace, in a chair with your little headphones listening to some music and watching people go buying bikinis and shorts and stuff? I can’t take it. Why not? It just makes you feel insecure. There’s too much silence. I heard that when guys would come home from the war, they said the silence was deafening. I had a lot of bad things growing up, lived a little bit of a rough life.
And so I’ve got some PTSD, not in the military sense, but in life, and silence is bad for me. Unless I’m with my kids, and I can let some of that go and I’m focused. It’s almost like someone with Tourette’s syndrome. If they’re focused on something, they don’t do the ticks. If I’m not creative when I’m at home, if I don’t go in the recording studio and work on the next record every night, at least for a few hours, I can sink into a depression and a real anxious time. I had an anxiety attack this morning.”
How does that manifest itself?
“I have this thing called an intercostal muscle problem. It’s the muscles around your ribs, and there’s the thing called the vagus nerve, which triggers all these things, and I don’t realize it, but my posture and when I tense up, it can cause these severe burning nerve pains in these muscles. You get a rapid heartbeat. You start to sweat. Things sort of look white, like the world has a veil over it. It helped when I quit drinking coffee, caffeine exacerbates it in the mornings, and all my panic attacks for years were in the morning. A holistic doctor told me that in the morning, your cortisol levels are higher, and cortisol is a thing that makes you anxious. We all have it in us. And when you drink coffee, caffeine raises that cortisol level. So I quit caffeine. When we were doing Goliath the entire first two seasons, I had a panic attack. Almost every morning I would drive to work having a panic attack.”
But his origins as a screenwriter and director aren’t part of that. This comes from a pulverizing experience with Weinstein, who has been in the New York courts trying to get a reprieve from rape charges. While Weinstein will now be known for his predilection to use the ambitions of young women for his prurient desires – he has steadfastly denied being a predator and has been convicted in both New York and Los Angeles, and the revelations sparked the #Metoo movement – Weinstein imposing his will on creative projects while a studio mogul has left Thornton and many other filmmakers with existential scarring and eternal regret their cinematic visions did not end up on the screen. That happened to Thornton on his adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy classic novel All The Pretty Horses. Coming off Sling Blade, that film was poised to be an epic. I always liked the film and performances by Matt Damon, Penelope Cruz, Lucas Black, Sam Shepard, Bruce Dern and others, Thornton lost his struggles with Weinstein and the world has never seen his film.
“The public will probably never know what that movie was,” Thornton says whimsically. “Matt Damon to this day says in its original form, it’s maybe his favorite movie he was ever in. Daniel Lanois did the original score. It’s beautiful. Maybe the best score I ever heard. And the studio thought it was, well it was two studios, Sony and Miramax, they thought it was too sparse. If you saw the movie and heard that score, you would go, okay, I get it.”
Thornton also fought over the film’s length with Weinstein using his formidable press spinning powers to make Thornton appear unreasonable.
“That whole idea about it being five hours long that was in the papers, it never existed,” he said. “It was two hours and 42 minutes. That was my cut. They cut it to an hour and 59 minutes. They cut essential things. At least they ultimately let me pick my guy to do the replacement score.
“Somewhere in my storage unit, I’ve got my original cut with Dan’s music,” Thornton said. “Roger Ebert used to say, you’ve got to put this out. And I said, I’d like to. I don’t know how to go about it. I don’t know what the rights are. I don’t know anything. But my dream was to get a lot of my favorite journalists together, like 50 people. You, and Roger if he was still around…people I’ve known over the years. I would just screen it for you guys, without any expectation. Not asking for an article. I understand just to show you guys what we did, but it’s not good for me to hang on to things. No. That destroys me. It eats me alive, from inside. And so I’ve learned, I’ve forgiven everybody who ever did anything to me.”
How does Thornton feel when everywhere one turns, there is Weinstein in some courtroom, stuck in prison likely for the rest of his days?
“Anytime I see anybody in trouble looking pathetic, I can’t help but have a little sympathy,” Thornton said. “It’s one of the things I learned a long time ago. Now believe me, this guy was not good to me and as it turns out, evidently he did some bad things to people. I was never witness to any of that. I didn’t hang out. But still, I guess more than anything, you get a little fascinated by how you can be that powerful and then suddenly that vulnerable. So I don’t forget what he is and what he did to me or anybody else, but one of the best lessons I’ve learned in my life was, don’t hold grudges. Let go of the past. Don’t let it dictate your future. Benjamin Franklin said, today is worth a thousand tomorrows. And there’s some other famous guy who said something about if you live in the past, then today cannot be happy. Because if you’re doing that, it’s not good. I don’t like vengeance and I don’t holding grudges. My father and I had a horrible relationship. I mean abusive. I didn’t cry at his funeral when I was 17, when he died, when I was in my thirties. I totally got who he was and why he did it. It’s like he wanted to be more than he was. He saw a sensitive kid who had potential and he was jealous of me. He would take things out on me. I had two brothers and I got the brunt of it. I was the oldest. I was the first male child in the family but I had a lot of women in the family, and they doted on me all the time. Anyway, the upshot is is that I just at some point you got to forgive and you got to let go.”
Thornton understands he was asking a lot in the way of faith from Weinstein, who only ever gave that to cornerstone auteur Quentin Tarantino.
“I think he just wanted it under two hours for more theater runs,” he said. “It really damaged All The Pretty Horses made me never want to direct again.”
Sheridan began his tour de force writing career after he’d been denied a raise on Sons of Anarchy and was told he should be grateful as he faced a future descending on the call sheet, is sensitized to slights and he had his own Weinstein woes. He wrote and directed Wind River for Weinstein. Just as the movie that exposed the disregard, rape and murder of Native American women on reservations came out, so did the abuse reports on Weinstein. It destroyed a worthy film.
“Directing is such a complete time commitment,” Sheridan told me. “And if you not making an independent film, wher the director or the writer director in both his and my instance have complete creative control, then it’s death by a thousand studio compromises. They never quit coming and it becomes so tedious to fight that. If you look at All the Pretty Horses, he went into this with the intention of making a big epic two hour and 40 minute movie. That was the 135 page script that everyone bought. And then that gets trimmed down to 90 minutes so that you can show it two or three more times in the cineplex, vision be damned? And the director has no control over that at the end of the day? For anyone to dedicate that amount of time and energy and passion, time away from family and all the things that directing a film requires, and then not be in control of the finished product, I think that that’s the resistance. We’ve all seen filmmakers who have made some brilliant films and then get in the studio machine and the brilliant, we expect brilliant, and we get mediocre. That’s the machine because the machine is designed to make mediocre, because mediocre is safe and familiar. I’m just speculating, because Billy and I haven’t talked about this, but Sling Blade is one of the best independent films ever made, incredible from top to bottom, visually, the way it was cast, script score. Everything about it . There are perfect films out there and that’s one of them.”
Sheridan, whose first scripts turned into the hits Sicario and Hell or High Water, now won’t sell a film script he writes unless he directs it or chooses the director and produces it, believes that Thornton could have a change of heart. Theatrical films, he believes, are making a comeback.
“It’s cyclical,” Sheridan said. “That’s a direct result of two things. It’s a result of the movie studios leaning toward an IP to base the franchise around of a film on, and not making the movies that made all of these studios to begin with. A studio’s not going to make Sicario today. They’re not going to do it. They’re not going to make Hell or High Water. They might not make The Godfather or certainly not at three hours. No Apocalypse Now or Unforgiven made today. So then we had Covid, everyone gets forced at home and they’re not making movies and a bunch of filmmakers and movie stars fled to the outlet that gave them the best opportunity. Right now, there’s far more money in streaming projects than in independent films to go tell a story the way we want to tell it. But there’s been some movies that have come out in the past year or so that have done very well at the box office that were not based on. Our industry is reactive and there does feel like a desire to return to the cinema, which is still the best way to digest this visual art.
“I think that you’ll see a swing back to studios starting to make those 30 to 50 million dramas again, and ambitious films. And I think you’ll see that there’s enough money in the independent world that they can be made there as well. I don’t think that the high end streaming premium long form storytelling markets going away, but I think that it will be supplemented by the same level of ambition starting to be exhibited by the studios just because they’re going to go where the dollars go. You do the math on a Landman getting 14 million viewers in Season One, do the P&L on that. They’re not going to leave that meal on the bone.”
Thornton feels content continuing to turn in strong performances in limited series, and make his music. I ask might he write and direct one of those series at a streamer or cabler where he’d assurances his vision would be protected?
“The idea is nice,” Thornton acknowledges. “But I’m not a spring chicken. I don’t know if I want to put in that much. That’s why I don’t direct anymore. I go do my thing as an actor, I go on tour, I make a record in the studio. That’s satisfying to me. To direct a movie or create a show, it takes a year and a half out of your life. I just don’t know if I want to do that. Do I have ideas? Absolutely. I love to do that. That’d be great. But I just don’t need the extra stress.”
Not when he can finish a season of Landman having the burlap mask taken off the head of his character, and there is Andy Garcia, who enlisted to play a lead in Season Two because he loved the script. Or Sam Elliott, a pal since their days making Tombstone, who’s also a central figure in Landman.
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